2 weeks Ago By Jorge Antunes
The Baffin Regional Chamber of Commerce and Makivvik Corp. are partnering to create the first “Arctic-led” trade show and conference in Ottawa in February. The Aqsarniit Trade Show and Conference will be held at the Rogers Centre (formerly the Shaw Centre) in Ottawa from Feb.
17 to 20, 2025, a joint news release from the two organizations announced Tuesday. “Makivvik is excited to be part of this Arctic-led event that brings together partners from across the Arctic to focus on building a future of economic success,” said Andy Moorhouse, Makivvik’s vice-president of economic development. The conference will focus on the opportunities and challenges of operating in the Arctic, said Chris West, executive director for the Baffin Regional Chamber of Commerce, in an interview.
“The BRCC felt the need to have an event of this size, and feel it’s important we continue the conversations we have in developing the Arctic,” he said, referring to the former Northern Lights Trade Show which the Aqsarniit Trade Show is set to replace. The long-running Northern Lights Trade Show was permanently cancelled in August . For 15 years running, the biennial Northern Lights event had been held on a rotating schedule between Ottawa and Montreal.
It was next scheduled for February 2025, prior to its cancellation. It has been organized by the Baffin chamber of commerce and the Labrador North Chamber Commerce. But it also included the NunatuKavut Community Council whose members identify as Inuit, despite other organizations saying it is not an Inuit-rights-holding group.
Sometime prior to the Northern Lights cancellation, the Baffin chamber received a letter from Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, West told Nunatsiaq News in August . In that letter ITK, the national organization for Inuit in Canada, said that if the NunatuKavut continued to be involved in Northern Lights, ITK would no longer participate and it would affect the trade show’s relationships with other Inuit organizations. “We’ve received tremendous support from [the Inuit organizations] for all of the events we do, and by pulling out of Northern Lights it hopefully shows .
.. the level of respect that we have for where they are coming from,” West said at the time.
The NunatuKavut Community Council is made up what it says are 6,000 Inuit-descended people of mixed ancestry. Over the past few years, NunatuKavut has been under increasing scrutiny and faced criticism from ITK and other regional Inuit associations. In 2023, ITK president Natan Obed published an open letter to “alert Canadians to false claims to Inuit identity.
” “NCC is a shape-shifting non-Indigenous organization that is part of the alarming trend of non-Indigenous people and groups co-opting Indigenous identities, cultures, and experiences to secure financial resources and rights,” Obed wrote on Nov. 6, 2023. While the name of the new Aqsarniit trade show means “northern lights” in Inuktitut, it represents a break from the previous Northern Lights event and “has nothing to do with the Labrador North Chamber of Commerce,” which had been a partner in Northern Lights.
“This is our event,” West said of the Aqsarniit trade show. He said they hope to have up to 150 exhibitors and 1,000 attendees. By comparison, the 2023 Northern Lights Trade show had approximately 250 exhibitors and 2,000 people attend, he said.
Makivvik Corp. did not respond to a request for an interview prior to publication. ITK declined to respond to a request for comment about the new trade show.
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